I gave a presentation at TechEd 2008 where I covered our new features in “A Day in the Life of a DBA”. Here’s what I showed for 8:00am – “Good Morning Sunshine”:

The first enhancement is the new options for strings that you can add in the connection dialogs. You can add options that are available like in ODBC. This allows you to control special settings based on connections for things like the Resource Governor and Analysis Services, for instance.

I also showed the new “Central Management Servers” (CMS). This is a single folder in Registered Servers where you can add new server registrations, and then others can connect to that main server (which is treated a little like a folder) and instantly see those registrations beneath it. This way you don’t have to export out your registrations and import them somewhere else.

You can also right-click a folder in Registered Servers (including a CMS) and run a query across all of them at once, bringing the results back into a single window with the server name listed. This is an awesome feature that you’ll find tons of uses for.